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Also by Lee Smith:

Dimestore, April 2016
Hardcover
Family Linen, February 2014
Paperback / e-Book
News Of The Spirit, July 2012
Trade Size / e-Book (reprint)
Sara Foster's Southern Kitchen, April 2011
Hardcover
On Agate Hill, September 2006
Hardcover

ON AGATE HILL
By: Lee Smith

Algonquin Books
September 2006
On Sale: September 1, 2006
416 pages
ISBN: 1565124529
EAN: 9781565124523
Hardcover
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Fiction

Molly Petree, orphaned by the Civil War, is by her own definition "a spitfire and a burden. I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl."

Raised in the ruins of a once prosperous plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina, she's a refugee who has no interest in self-pity. To document her headstrong life, she collects its artifacts—her lifelong diaries, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, bones (some human, some not).

When a mysterious benefactor appears out of her father's past to rescue her, teenaged Molly Petree never looks back. Taking what she is offered, she saves herself and then risks everything to hold true to her nature and to true love. She casts aside two prosperous, well-born suitors to marry a dashing—and philandering—mountaineer only to be accused of his murder. The end of Molly Petree's story is as unpredictable and as passionate as her own wide-open heart.

Spanning half a century, Lee Smith's portrait of a fiery Southern woman recalls the South from Reconstruction to the Roaring Twenties—and, in the process, gives us Molly Petree, living and breathing, gripping the reader's arm as the story unfolds.

Media Buzz

Morning Edition - December 12, 2006